


termination shock

by anonymousAlchemist, emi_rose



Series: periapsis [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, melancholy moods, soft angst, tw gaslighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 03:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13379541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist, https://archiveofourown.org/users/emi_rose/pseuds/emi_rose
Summary: termination shock (n.) - the boundary marking one of the outer limits of a star’s influence, where the stellar wind dramatically slows.Insomnia and guilt do not good companions make. Lup is missing. Faerun is in shambles. Lucretia and Taako share a cup of tea and a conversation.





	termination shock

**_termination shock (n.)_ ** _ \- the boundary marking one of the outer limits of a star’s influence, where the stellar wind dramatically slows _

 

* * *

 

The grey dawn light begins to spill over the horizon, adding a subtle wash of illumination to the large map Lucretia has spread out over the solid cherrywood table. The air is still cool and petrichor-scented, a recent rainstorm lending a not unwelcome heaviness to the morning dew. Thousands of stars are marked carefully on the celestial sphere, their positions checked and double checked by sextant and practiced eyes. She can barely manage a smile, one that doesn’t reach her eyes, at Lup’s addition to her map - a crude dick drawn in connect-the-dots in what could have been part of the Crane. A hundred times, almost, they’d played this game - she would circle a new plane, mapping the stars carefully and accurately, recording the constellations as the world below saw them. In their more barren years, they would invent constellations themselves, making smiley faces and butts and really, anything else Lup and Magnus found funny. 

She closes her journal with a snap and sighs. “Can’t sleep either? Or have you finally decided to take up meditation?” she asks, hearing sharp as ever.

“Luce, you know that cha’boy’s only gonna start meditating when the astral plane freezes over, or when beds stop being the best fucking thing since my cooking, whichever comes first,” Taako says, dispensing with his pretense of stealth. “You stay up all night? Heard you humans need those eight hours to like, live and stuff.” 

She thinks for a moment, considering her options. “I just got up early. I needed to double-check some positions in the far southern hemisphere. If this is going to be home, then…” she trails off, willing herself not to show any more emotions.

He snorts. “Puh-leeze. Like you ever got up early in your  _ life _ ,” he says, peering over her shoulder. “Last one, huh.” His voice, softer. 

“Last one,” she echoes, and tries to will herself into believing that it’s a good thing, that they know what to do now that their endless flight is over, that they haven’t doomed this world, too, through action rather than inaction. 

“Hey, that one looks like a wang,” he says, pointing at the constellation Lup drew. 

Lucretia laughs wanly. “It is indeed a wang. Courtesy of your—” her voice chokes up. Lup’s still missing, and every day that passes makes her return less and less likely. 

“She’s gonna be back,” Taako says. “She left a note and everything. S’not like Lulu can die, not like us chumps.” It’s only been two weeks. She’ll be back. 

She raises an eyebrow at his brash confidence, then turns her attention back to the constellations on her map, rendered invisible in the sky by the singular sun. “I wonder when we’ll get used to this,” she says, waving a hand to indicate the blue sky and yellow star, all the wrong colors. 

“Hey, look on the bright side. Better than the world where the plane of magic crashed into the material one. Jeezy creezy, that one was a clusterfuck. Coulda been stranded there instead, you ever think of that? Or the world made of jelly. It wasn’t even good jelly!” 

Lucretia begins to roll up the weathered paper. “It  _ was _ surprisingly shitty jelly, yes.” She winces involuntarily, not sure if anyone’s told him yet about Candlekeep. She supposes not, since he can talk about jelly without getting the distant look in his eye, the one that she knows means he’s not there anymore. 

He notices her movement. “What’s wrong?” 

She hesitates, her own eyes glassing over for a moment as she considers her place, puts the map away safely, folds her arms. “D’you know Candlekeep?” she asks, steadying. 

“Town near the Cloud Peaks? What about it?” he asks, crossing his arms, unconsciously mirroring her gesture. 

“Former town,” she says, grimacing. 

Taako stares at her for a long second. “Oh,” he says. “Well, fuck.” 

He sits down at the table and rests his forehead on his forearms, muffling his speech. 

“Was it mine?” 

She nods, even though he can’t see it, swallows bitterness. “Grape jelly.”

He visited Candlekeep a couple of times. It was a nice place. Resort town, nestled between the mountains and along the shoreline. Had great beaches. He went surfing there, brought his board down from the ship. A couple of local kids had wanted to learn, so he gave them a crash course in the fine art of hanging ten. They were garbage at it. 

“That’s the worst fucking kinda jelly,” he says, not lifting his face from the table. 

Lucretia scoots her chair right up next to him, wraps a long arm around his shoulders, rests her head on his back. It should be awkward but it’s more sad than anything else. “They didn’t even manage to pick something actually edible.” 

“Right?” he says, mouth moving on autopilot. “Black raspberry, cherry, apricot. Whole world of jelly out there, and they pick grape.” 

“Some people have no taste,” Lucretia says, trailing off and sinking into the sad silence she inhabits more and more often. 

“Literally,” he says. They’re jelly now, probably, the poor sap who grabbed his stupid rock. He’s not sad about it, but the whole situation is dumb. Peppermint cities, diamond valleys, jelly towns. “Shoulda never made the thing,” he admits. “People are fucking idiots about transmutation.” 

“No going back now,” she murmurs. She stands up slowly, as if underwater. She hasn’t slept in two days and the world is starting to sparkle around the edges. “You want some tea?”

“I don’t want tea, I want a drink,” he says, looking up. She opens her mouth to respond, but is cut off. “Ha, kidding, just kidding, it’s like five in the morning. Tea’s good, if you’re making it.” 

“Matcha latte?” she asks, already knowing the answer. “C’mon. I’m getting cold.”

“Mmkay,” he says, and stands up. 

They walk over to the kitchen together. The kitchen is an originally-cramped galley with the wall between the dining room and food prep station blown out — literally, halfway through the first cycle when Lup thought the kitchen needed more space. There are dishes drying in the rack, a few spoons in the sink, signs of life and use in an otherwise spotless space. Taako keeps the place neater than Lup does — the inverse of their lab desks. 

He’s going to have to throw out the jelly. Damn, and it’s homemade, too. Lucretia winces when she sees it on the counter. She busies herself steaming the milk, pulling the vanilla-scented syrup Lup made down from the cabinet, trying to sublimate the whirling energy inside her into this task. This, Lucretia can perfect. She’s spent a century learning, and it’s only been in the past decade or so that Taako’s allowed anyone besides his sister to make him the perfect matcha latte. 

Weirdly enough, their home plane is the only one that had them. 

“You gonna go sleep after this?” Taako asks, carefully putting three jars of jam, jelly, and preserves in the trash can. 

Lucretia jumps at his voice. “No, no, I have so much work to do.” She smiles, tight-lipped, well aware that he hears the inevitable screams whenever she tries to sleep without magical aid. 

“You gotta sleep sometime, Luce,” he says. “You’ll freak Mags and Barry out if you just keel over.” 

“No one’s ever died from lack of sleep,” she rolls her eyes. She hopes he doesn’t know much about humans and sleep beyond the basics.

“Uh, yeah they have,” Taako says. 

“Well then,” Lucretia murmurs, not breaking eye contact as she pours the steamed milk with a practiced hand. 

“What? Cha’boy’s not an idiot, I do my research. I’ve known you for what? Oh, that’s right, a century. C’mon. Take a nap after latte time, you’ll feel better. I’ll do that magic thingy if you need it,” he says, cavalier as can be. 

She turns away, hiding the tears welling up in her eyes, the lability of two days without sleep catching up to her. “Sure, if you’re not busy. Don’t want to put you out,” she says, voice wavering  more than she would like. She hands him a mug, frothy green with a perfect cream heart. 

“Does it look like I’m busy?” he says, smiling a little to see the heart. He glances up at her. “Aw, no, don’t cry. You know I’m no good at that sorta thing.” 

She laughs a little and wipes at her eyes. “I dunno, you have things to do. You know, Taako stuff.” She sips her tea, earthy and just sweet enough. 

He transmutes a stray piece of paper into a few tissues and hands them to her. “Luce, it’s five in the morning and I’ve been awake all night. Do I look like I have things going on? Your answer to that should be  _ no. _ ” 

Taako drinks his latte. “Hey, you got the foam right.” 

She rolls her eyes with the first genuine smile that’s graced her face in days, maybe even weeks. “Learned from the best.” She says something else, something he can’t quite make out. As if her voice has become a gentle staticky hum, and suddenly, it snaps back into focus. “You know,” she finishes, regarding him carefully, almost dispassionately. 

“I know?” he says, eyebrows raised, head cocked sideways.

“Yeah,” she looks at him as if he does know, he must know, and she does her best to keep the satisfaction from playing across her face. She makes a mental note, lights a spark of hope deep inside, one that could grow to bulwark her against the constant stream of destruction that occupies her every waking moment. 

Lucretia puts her tea on the corner of the table and sits down heavily. She fixes Taako with a piercing stare, one she’s had to perfect, and rests her chin on her fist. “D’you feel guilty?” she asks. 

He narrows his eyes. “Is this about me takin’ your spare notebook for an experiment? ‘Cause I told you the goo was an accident, and I will  _ swear _ under Merle’s truth thing that it actually was. This time.” 

She sighs. “No, I wrote that off as collateral damage ages ago. You guys wrecked enough of ‘em on purpose, I made triplicates of everything.” She draws her knees up to her chest, hugs them close, gives a half-smile. “No. I mean, about your...artifact.” Her gaze is expectant. 

“Not my fault if some idiot fucks up when using it,” he says. The way his ears stick straight up indicates otherwise. 

“Can anybody use it, though? It’s not like people are out there just doing, I don’t know, normal boring shit with them! You’ve heard them talk to you, haven’t you?” she asks, in an accelerating, frantic crescendo. Fisher makes an inquisitive trill from the other room.

“Yeah,” he says, remembering the way the stone whispered to him, asked to be used. The beautiful things he could make. The powerful artifacts. He could turn anything into anything else, everything mutable. It was seductive. 

“We made them, Taako, we made them and it’s hard for us to resist. How is anyone going to look at that and say, yeah, no thanks, no topaz city or massive typhoon or giant shield, not today?” The exhaustion that tinged her voice before sunrise is completely gone, replaced with urgency. 

“It was the best of the bad options,” he says, voice calmer than hers. More tired. “It’s not like your plan would have been much better. Yeah, sure, fine, there’s collateral. Maybe we shoulda hid our shit better. I don’t know, what do you want me to tell you, Luce? S’not like it matters at this point.” 

Lucretia’s world stops spinning around her. She raises her eyebrows. “It doesn’t matter?  _ Really?” _

He leans forward. “Lucretia. There are precisely six other people I give a shit about in this godsforsaken multiverse, and five of them are on the ship right now, all right? Don’t, don’t ask me to  _ care _ about more, alright?” 

He’s thinking about the surfer kids, that he talked to at Candlekeep. They couldn’t have been more than teenagers. They had scuffled over who got to ride the waves first, and they had hung onto his every word. He guesses they’re all dead, probably. 

She shakes her head in disbelief. “If this is it, then we have to do as much as we can to — to —  _ mitigate _ the damage we cause. We don’t get any more do-overs.” 

“Yeah, well,” he says. He takes another sip of his drink. “You’re not wrong.” 

In the dim light of morning, he mostly looks tired. The light throws the bags under Lucretia’s dark eyes into sharp relief, and her cheekbones are more pronounced. She’s exhausted, but more than that, she’s hollowed out, and it looks like she’s aged a premature decade. She shakes her head and stands up, stretching her back with a yawn. 

“I should sleep,” she says, dropping the subject. “Help a girl out?”

“What’s the magic word?” he says, already preparing a spell.  

“Abracadabra? Or a different one?”

“Nah, that’ll do,” he laughs, and presses a glowing palm to her forehead, transferring the glow to her skin. It dissipates immediately. “Get to your bunk before you pass out, pumpkin, I don’t have the muscle mass or spell slots to carry you.” 

Lucretia can only nod gratefully as the heaviness seeps into her limbs. The walls blur as she walks the short distance to her bunk, and can’t be bothered to respond to Fisher, who hums gently. She’s asleep before her head hits the pillow. She doesn’t dream. 

Taako drinks the last of his latte in the kitchen alone. The single sun rises over Faerun, and he watches the world grow warm. He wonders if Lup is watching it too. He wonders when she’s going to be back. He definitely doesn’t think about a small beachside town that no longer exists.

* * *

 

Lucretia has been working tirelessly for weeks, now. She is precise but merciless in what she redacts, thick black ink spilling over as much information as she dares to leave intact. The more recent entries in her journal are the hardest to face. Her brush hesitates over the entry about Candlekeep, and she thinks for a long moment. She puts the brush back in her inkpot, deciding that she could afford this mercy. The gentle light of Fisher’s bell reflects off her tears, tears she does not bother to dry. She hums static, and returns to her lonely work, the shape of things to come.

* * *

 

A few weeks later, Taako decides to make cookies. No real reason for it. It’s a good distraction. He’s thinking...thumbprint cookies, the type with the hollow in the center that gets filled with jam. 

He goes through his cupboards and pulls out ingredients. Flour, sugar, vanilla. He rummages through the fridge. Milk, eggs — huh. There’s not a single jar of jam, or jelly, or preserves. 

His brow furrows. Weird. Maybe he’ll make macarons instead. 

**Author's Note:**

> come scream @ us about taz on tumblr!  
> iz is @[anonymousalchemist](http://anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com/) and emi @[emi--rose](https://emi--rose.tumblr.com/)  
> liner notes to come when we're less sleepy.


End file.
